


Sleep

by TheSigyn



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-12
Updated: 2010-02-12
Packaged: 2018-04-15 13:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4608042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack loves to watch Ianto sleep. But why should Jack get all the fun?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep

  
Ianto shifted in his sleep and hummed gently. The lights of Cardiff cast a thin glow through his pristinely kept bedroom, turning everything a quiet shade of blue. Jack lay in bed beside him, and watched him.   
  
He didn’t always stay all night. Most of the time Ianto woke at his absurdly early alarm and found that Jack had already headed back to the hub. But sometimes Jack simply needed to breathe him in, and he would lay in Ianto’s arms, just feeling his heart beat, listening to his breathing. He would watch as the tangle of dreams played across his face, dancing through his closed eyes. Jack loved watching him. Just watching him sleep.   
  
After a moment the weight of Jack’s gaze penetrated Ianto’s consciousness. He opened his eyes to find Jack staring at him. Again. He grunted and closed his eyes again. “Still here,” he muttered.   
  
“Still here,” Jack whispered.   
  
“Why are you always watching me whenever I open my eyes?” Ianto asked sleepily.“Don’t you ever sleep?”  
  
Jack shook his head. “No.”   
  
Ianto opened his eyes again. He hadn’t meant to even ask the question. It was one of those things you didn’t ask Jack, because his eyes would turn dark and his face cloud over, but Ianto was half asleep and wasn’t thinking. It was done now. Ianto had suspected the answer before now. It was something he’d been thinking about for months. He realized that maybe now, maybe tonight, was the time to get to the bottom of it. Maybe even solve it. “‘No?’ How can you not sleep?”  
  
“Among the many things I never suffer from is sleep deprivation,” Jack said. “I got out of the habit of it.”   
  
Ianto rearranged his head on the pillow to look at him. “How does that happen?”   
  
Jack shrugged. “A few invasions, some kidnapings, a divorce, an alien epidemic and a mild explosion all in one month,” he said. “Really takes the desire to sleep right out of you.”   
  
Ianto blinked. A divorce? Ianto was never sure how much of what Jack said was facetious or misleading. But this made sense. Jack hadn’t slept... since a divorce. He supposed Jack hadn’t intended him to pick that word out of the litany of disasters, but Ianto cherished any of the little drops of history that Jack was willing to let loose. He filed that comment in the back of his mind, and continued with the problem at hand. “So why do you have a bed?” Ianto asked, referring to the bed that Jack kept at the hub that Ianto had to vacuum under.   
  
Jack grinned. “Of all the people to ask,” he said slyly.   
  
Ianto blushed, but he narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t letting it go.   
  
Jack sighed. “I rest, sometimes,” he admitted.   
  
“If you need to rest, why don’t you try and sleep?”   
  
Jack looked away into the dark corners of the room. He never answered this question.   
  
“Jack!”  
  
Jack prevaricated. “You’ve seen me, sort of. Lose consciousness, anyway.”   
  
“Being killed isn’t sleeping,” Ianto admonished. “Jack, will you talk to me? Please. Why won’t you sleep?” Jack didn’t answer and he didn’t answer. “Please.” The whisper was barely a breath on the air.   
  
Ah, those beautiful Welsh vowels could draw poison from a wound, let alone words from Jack’s heart. He sighed. “Too many memories,” he admitted. “Too much time. It all weighs on me.” He looked down at Ianto. “Turns into too many nightmares.”   
  
Ianto stared at him for a long while. “You need your nightmares,” he said finally. “Or you need your dreams, anyway. That’s how your memories stop weighing on you. Let your mind sort it all out, compartmentalize, file it, lock it up in the vaults so you can move on.”   
  
Jack shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way.”   
  
“Yes it does,” Ianto said, with defiant confidence. He sat upright, looking down into Jack’s finely chiseled face. “You don’t eat properly, your idea of exercise only includes chasing aliens and sex, and now it turns out you never sleep? You may be immortal, Jack, but you’re not a god!”   
  
“Not quite what you said earlier tonight,” Jack grinned.   
  
“I’m serious,” Ianto said, though he smiled. He shook his head. “You don’t take care of yourself.”   
  
“I don’t need to,” Jack said, with that wistful sadness that always made Ianto’s heart quicken.   
  
“No,” Ianto said, the grin fading from his face. He kissed Jack’s forehead with such tenderness that Jack felt himself melting. “That’s my job,” he whispered. He wrapped his arms tightly around Jack’s shoulders and pulled him closer to his chest. “Close your eyes.”  
  
“No.”   
  
“I said close your eyes.”  
  
“No!” Jack pulled away. “You don’t understand. The things I’ve seen...” He pinched the bridge of his nose. How to convey this without frightening him? “There are things in this universe... there are things I have lost, things I have done that... there’s too much pain and regret. They all show up when I sleep.”   
  
“I may be a lot younger than you,” Ianto said. “But you know what I’ve done. You were there. You think I don’t regret Lisa? I burned through my nightmares...” he looked down. “Mostly. But if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be sane.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes. “Did you walk into Auschwitz?” he asked. He looked back into Ianto’s surprised face. “You ever faced an army of daleks? Ever abandoned a lover? How often have you been the only one alive in a sea of death? I’m too mad, Ianto. I’m too mad a creation, and I can’t let my subconscious run through me like that. There’s just too much.”  
  
Ianto stared at him. Jack and his flippant devil-may-care attitude was something Ianto loved about him, but when he let his pain bubble to the surface it was like watching a volcano. The molten heat of the entire earth seemed to pulse beneath Jack’s heart. “Maybe not,” he said. “But you need to sleep.”  
  
Jack shook his head. “I don’t need anything,” he said.   
  
Ianto swallowed. “Not even me?” he whispered.   
  
Jack realized what he had said. He opened his mouth, but he realized taking it back would just bring the problem back again. Not to mention make him sound like an idiot. “I certainly love you a lot,” he said instead.   
  
“How much?” Ianto asked.   
  
“You can’t put a measure on that,” Jack said.   
  
“Enough to trust me?” Ianto said.   
  
“I do trust you.”   
  
“You just don’t trust yourself,” Ianto said.   
  
Jack looked down. “Can we let this go?” he asked wearily.   
  
Ianto caught Jack’s head in his hands and stared into his face. “I want you, Jack,” he breathed, and the heat of his breath passed in waves all through him. “I want all of you. I want to open my eyes in the morning and find you sleeping peacefully beside me. I want to lay down beside you in the night and feel as if our dreams were shared. I want to watch you drift off in my arms because there’s nothing in the universe more peaceful than lying here with me.”  
  
He kissed Jack gently on the lips. “I want you,” he continued, “to share this with me. I don’t want you to hold yourself back. I need you to trust me.”   
  
Jack felt himself weakening. Ianto could be very persuasive, but more, he so rarely asked for anything. He could lie there, hard as a rock for an hour, letting Jack take his pleasure, and not ask for release. If he was asking for this, it was very important to him. Jack tried not to say it, because he thought it would scare him off, but he really would do anything for Ianto. “It won’t work,” he said, one last, frail protest.   
  
“Let me try,” Ianto said. “I know you’re so very tired. If it doesn’t work, or it goes badly, at least I’ll know you let me.”  
  
Jack couldn’t help it. He tilted his head and caught Ianto’s lips with his own. His kiss was sweet and gentle and hesitant as a first kiss from a teenager, and Ianto caressed his tongue in turn with such tenderness it was like eating custard. When Jack finally let the kiss fall Ianto opened his mouth. “Don’t change the subject,” he breathed against Jack’s lips.   
  
Jack smiled, but his lip trembled. “It won’t work,” he said again. But he shifted until his head leaned against Ianto’s smooth chest.   
  
Ianto pulled them back against the pillows, turning so that Jack was as comfortable as possible. His lips brushed against the top of Jack’s head. “It’ll work,” he whispered with confidence.   
  
Jack cringed, and Ianto realized that his lover was actually frightened. He could face vicious weevils and monstrous aliens and demons loosed literally out of hell, but when presented with someone he loved demanding he face his own subconscious, Jack was terrified. “Oh, Jack,” Ianto whispered into his hair. “You know I love you?” And in asking the question, Ianto suddenly knew that it would work, and he knew how he would make it work.   
  
“You know I love you,” he said again. His voice was even and slow, hypnotic in its cadence. “You know it deep inside. You knew it even before I did. It was there, in my eyes. Those eyes you used to catch when I was wasn’t on my guard. Catch them and hold them like frightened sparrows. And now I’m here. And I’ve taken you into my arms and I’ve drawn you into my bed. And there is nothing in the whole wide world but you and me.”   
  
Ianto heard Jack sigh as the tension left his shoulders. He shifted to make them even more comfortable before he continued. “You can feel it, can’t you,” Ianto whispered, conspiratorially. “That the whole universe has just disappeared. There’s only you and me and this warm bed. And my arms around you. And my heart beating against you. My breath against your hair. There isn’t any past behind us. There’s no future ahead of us. There’s only the night and the darkness and the stillness and us.”   
  
Jack yawned. Ianto suppressed a smile. “Can’t you feel my heart?” he asked. It was the height of hubris to talk his presence up like this, but it was the only way. There was so much past behind Jack, and the horror of so much future ahead of him. The only way to stand up against that tide of time was to shrink time to only one space, one moment, one thing. And, Ianto had decided, that thing had to be him. The gentle, accepting presence of one person who loved him. That was all Jack could think about, or the weight of the years would drag him back down, away from his peace, through nightmares and back into wretched consciousness. “Beating so slowly,” he whispered. “Beating only for you. Because there’s only you. And there’s only me. There’s no universe. There’s no time. There’s just me. Warm skin against yours. Breath in time with yours. Heart in time with yours. There’s only Ianto. Jack and Ianto.”   
  
Ianto kept his quiet murmuring running for a further twenty minutes. At the end of that time, he quietly shifted his head to look down at Jack’s face.  
  
Jack was no longer awake. Ianto’s heart clenched. Jack’s face was open and defenseless in his sleep. There were times, not often, but times when Ianto could see into the depths of eternity in Jack’s eyes. A hollow vortex of time itself pouring through the soul of this man he loved. But in Jack’s sleeping face Ianto saw, not time, but years. In his young, handsome face there were as many years as the oldest and most battle scarred world war veteran. There was pain in the set of his brow and grief in the tilt of his eyes. But his mouth, half open, breathing deeply like a child, spoke of a capacity to love that made Ianto want to cry. He wanted to kiss him, but he barely moved. He wouldn’t do anything to pull Jack from the first real sleep he had had in... Ianto didn’t know. Twenty years? Forty? More than Ianto was prepared to guess. Good god, how he must have needed the rest.   
  
Ianto tilted his head back and watched Jack sleep. He loved this man so much. Impossibly much. Every time he merely said “I love you” it felt like a lie. It was so much more than that. He needed to breathe him in, let him lay in his arms and just feel his eternal heart beat, listen to his breath. He watched as the tangle of dreams played across his face. There would be no nightmares tonight. Ianto had hypnotized them out of existence. Ianto just watched him. Watched him sleep.   
  
At an absurdly early hour, Ianto’s alarm went off. Usually waking early was the only way he had enough time in a day to maintain the hub. Now he mentally cursed himself for not throwing the wretched thing out the window to rest until the end of time in a shallow grave in his neighbor’s garden. He moved one arm and firmly clicked the cursed machine off. By the time he turned back to his lover, Jack had opened his eyes.   
  
“Sorry,” Ianto murmured. He wanted to say 'Go back to sleep,' but he wasn’t sure such a thing would be possible.   
  
Jack was staring at him. There was a peace to his brow that Ianto had never seen before. Slowly, Jack brought Ianto’s hand to his face and brushed his fingertips with his lips. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment as he held the back of his hand to his cheek. His hand held Ianto’s so hard it was trembling — or Ianto thought that was why it was trembling. Jack opened his eyes and looked up at him. “You look tired,” Jack said. He said nothing else, but there was such a weight of gratitude in his face that he was barely keeping it in. A gratitude so profound it almost looked painful.   
  
Ianto smiled down at him. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said quietly.


End file.
